The ruling Chinese Communist Party has decided to allow married couples to have a third child, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, in a major policy change to grapple with the country's negative effects of the low birthrate.
China's population has been aging, due largely to its "one-child policy" introduced in 1979, but it was scrapped in 2016 as worries grew that a rapidly aging population would constrain the nation's economic expansion.
Although the government has permitted all married couples to have a second child since then, China has not seen a baby boom so far despite fears that a possible shrinkage of the population could undermine economic development.
The latest policy change was approved during a politburo meeting of the ruling party, chaired by President Xi Jinping, Xinhua said.
"Implementing the policy and its relevant supporting measures will help improve China's population structure, actively respond to the aging population, and preserve the country's human resource advantages," the news agency quoted the meeting as saying.
But it is uncertain whether China can counter the low birthrate, as many young Chinese citizens have become concerned about their future, analysts say.
Unless Xi's leadership fundamentally reforms the nation's social security system and provides a safe environment to raise a family, Chinese couples would remain unwilling to have a number of children, they said.
In China, young people have been recently struggling to buy a house against a backdrop of a constant rise in real estate prices, while the country's pension, medical and welfare systems have not been fully developed.
Earlier this month, government data showed the total population on the Chinese mainland grew to 1.41 billion in 2020 but the proportion of those aged 60 or older also increased.
The release by the National Bureau of Statistics of the population data based on a once-a-decade census came as the nation's population is expected to begin falling in a few years, ending a five-decade trend of growth.
If the population decreases in China, it would be the first since the catastrophic Great Leap Forward from 1958 through the early 1960s, regarded as a misguided economic policy initiated by Mao Zedong, caused tens of millions of people to starve to death.
In 2020, the population was 1,411.78 million, compared with 1,400.05 million in 2019. It grew annually by 0.53 percent on average over the past decade, according to the data.
Chinese people aged 60 and over accounted for 18.7 percent of the total population, 5.44 percentage points higher than the level in 2010, when the previous census was conducted.
The population of China, excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, exceeded 1.4 billion by the end of 2019 for the first time since Mao founded the Communist-led People's Republic of China in 1949.
